Educators and parents are finding it more difficult to ensure that students are taking the time to study. Students have access to many types of electronic equipment that allow them unsupervised diversions. For example, students can logon to Internet chat sessions; play electronic video games on desktop computers, hand-held devices, or television sets; download and play music and videos from the Internet; watch a television program or a DVD video; or surf the World Wide Web. When a student is using a computer, watching a television set, or playing a video game, a parent can never be sure that the child is doing something educational.
Prior art systems have sought to provide educational programs on desktop computers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,980,264, titled “Screen Saver,” teaches a screen saver that displays questions and receives answers, testing a user's knowledge on certain topics. The screen saver is only activated on a computer that has not received input from the user for a predetermined time period. The screen saver does not require that the user answer a question correctly before he is returned to the application that was running on the computer before the screen saver was invoked.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,743,743, titled “Learning Method and System that Restricts Entertainment,” to Ho et al. (Ho I), teaches a system and method that decouples peripherals from a system until an educational task has been performed. In one embodiment, Ho I teaches installing a virtual device driver that sits between a program and an actual device driver that handles I/O to a device. The virtual device driver intercepts function calls to the device driver and determines whether the running program can couple to the device. Thus, only approved programs can access the device. This system requires a virtual device driver for each device the system is coupled to. Thus, entry points to each device driver must be rewritten to determine which programs may or may not access the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,139,330, titled “Computer-Aided Learning System and Method,” to Ho et al. (Ho II), teaches a system and method that test a user on different subjects. The system decouples a device used for entertainment—such as a speaker, a joystick, or a circuit-board that may send and receive signals. In this system, one or more devices are completely unavailable to the user while using a testing system. In one embodiment, this system disables a device driver, reenabling it only when the user performs some specified task, such as attempting to answer a question.
Both Ho I and Ho II envision testing a user when the computer is first turned on. Neither Ho I nor Ho II teaches testing a user at given time intervals or periodically, upon the occurrence of a pre-determined event. Neither Ho I nor Ho II teaches a method or system that allows the user to resume the application running before the testing system was invoked.
None of the prior art references discussed above teach a system that suspends an application program, runs an educational task—including any number of tasks or drills, such as those testing reading comprehension, general knowledge on a subject, or the pronunciation of words in a foreign language—and then efficiently resumes the application program. Accordingly, what is needed is a testing system that can periodically suspend an application program when a configurable suspension criterion is met and resume the application program when a configurable resumption criterion is met.